PlainSnailing
Member
Hello everyone.
For full disclosure I have a technical problem which relates to a desktop I bulit myself, and not one bought and assembled from PCS, so if nobody wishes to offer any suggestions, then I would understand. I'd bought a couple of laptops from PCS over the last four years, and always felt that this forum was a friendly environment regardless, even as I had grown and moved into the phase of building my own gear.
So, the problem is concerning my CPU being stuck by thermal grease to it's heatsink. The chipset is an AMD FX8350, and the heatsink in question is the stock AMD cooler it shipped with. I had no intentions in the forseeable future of ever over-clocking, so I trusted that stock cooling would be sufficient. Alas, the AMD cooler had a tendency of squealing when under load, so after some consideration I decided I would replace it. Everything went great as I opened up my case and made my preparations, but after wiggling the heatsink off, I encountered my current predicament.
If it weren't for the pang of horror then I'm sure I would have been driven to apoplexy. Mercifully, all of the CPU pins are intact and unbent, but currently I have no way of safely conducting a test to see if the AM3 socket on the motherboard is broken. Apparently this problem is common across all CPU designs, and is especially likely if the paste is old or applied too copiously. Well I didn't apply any of my own paste, but went with the pre-applied paste on the heatsink, and so far my computer has been in use for about two weeks.
I've been searching for solutions online for the last five hours on and off. I've tried rubbing alcohol (I don't have any isopropyl, but I do have plenty of 94% proof methylated spirits), a hairdryer, gentle probing with an old credit card. The only two methods I haven't tried are soaking the CPU in alcohol, and dental floss, because of wary scepticism and lacking the requisite materials respectively.
As things are now, neither heat nor dabbing around the edges with alcohol on cotton buds has made the CPU budge so much as a micron to the naked eye. Nothing online seems to be particularly helpful, and a lot of forums are conjecturing, inventing obviously dangerous and unhelpful advise, turning the whole thread into a processor fanboy flame war, or all of the above. I want to try floss in the morning, but the way the chipset looks so flush against the heatsink, I don't see how it would actually work. I seem to recall that AMD make their processors convex to Intel's concave, so in theory there ought to be some slight crevise, but I'm not optimistic.
I'll not know about the condition of the motherboard until I either retrieve the CPU or buy a replacement (the idea makes me nauseous), but the pins on the chipset are all intact and I'm desperate to recover it if at all possible. If bother CPU and motherboard are bricked after less than a month, then I don't know what I'll do. Something like this would never be covered by warranty.
Thank you all for your time.
For full disclosure I have a technical problem which relates to a desktop I bulit myself, and not one bought and assembled from PCS, so if nobody wishes to offer any suggestions, then I would understand. I'd bought a couple of laptops from PCS over the last four years, and always felt that this forum was a friendly environment regardless, even as I had grown and moved into the phase of building my own gear.
So, the problem is concerning my CPU being stuck by thermal grease to it's heatsink. The chipset is an AMD FX8350, and the heatsink in question is the stock AMD cooler it shipped with. I had no intentions in the forseeable future of ever over-clocking, so I trusted that stock cooling would be sufficient. Alas, the AMD cooler had a tendency of squealing when under load, so after some consideration I decided I would replace it. Everything went great as I opened up my case and made my preparations, but after wiggling the heatsink off, I encountered my current predicament.
If it weren't for the pang of horror then I'm sure I would have been driven to apoplexy. Mercifully, all of the CPU pins are intact and unbent, but currently I have no way of safely conducting a test to see if the AM3 socket on the motherboard is broken. Apparently this problem is common across all CPU designs, and is especially likely if the paste is old or applied too copiously. Well I didn't apply any of my own paste, but went with the pre-applied paste on the heatsink, and so far my computer has been in use for about two weeks.
I've been searching for solutions online for the last five hours on and off. I've tried rubbing alcohol (I don't have any isopropyl, but I do have plenty of 94% proof methylated spirits), a hairdryer, gentle probing with an old credit card. The only two methods I haven't tried are soaking the CPU in alcohol, and dental floss, because of wary scepticism and lacking the requisite materials respectively.
As things are now, neither heat nor dabbing around the edges with alcohol on cotton buds has made the CPU budge so much as a micron to the naked eye. Nothing online seems to be particularly helpful, and a lot of forums are conjecturing, inventing obviously dangerous and unhelpful advise, turning the whole thread into a processor fanboy flame war, or all of the above. I want to try floss in the morning, but the way the chipset looks so flush against the heatsink, I don't see how it would actually work. I seem to recall that AMD make their processors convex to Intel's concave, so in theory there ought to be some slight crevise, but I'm not optimistic.
I'll not know about the condition of the motherboard until I either retrieve the CPU or buy a replacement (the idea makes me nauseous), but the pins on the chipset are all intact and I'm desperate to recover it if at all possible. If bother CPU and motherboard are bricked after less than a month, then I don't know what I'll do. Something like this would never be covered by warranty.
Thank you all for your time.
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